Welcome to The Cole Report

Or, how this journey to Substack kicked off in the Kabul airport parking lot

Kamdesh, Afghanistan October 2006. Photo: Sergio Caro

I arrived at Kabul International Airport in late October 2006. The flight from Dubai was mostly empty and uneventful, though Geraldo Rivera and his Fox News crew flew in first-class, which was no different than the economy section of the old Airbus. I seemed to be the only passenger who sat in their assigned seat as several older Afghan men with graying beards and wearing shalwar kameez spread throughout coach, sitting in whichever seat looked best. We landed in the late morning.

At the time, the airport was small and quiet, and although there was some general commotion at passport control, I remember exiting with my luggage quickly and without incident. I made my way outside the terminal. Low, gray clouds hung overhead, and it was impossible to tell if they were filled with moisture or pollution. A few cars drove by, but the silence seemed at odds with my vision of a ‘war zone.’ A layer of dust covered everything within view. 

I’d come to Afghanistan to embed with the U.S. Army. I carried one bag, a large outdoor expedition backpack, blue. In it, I had a few notebooks and pens, a laptop, a camera, a Nokia cellphone, a few pairs of clean underwear and socks, a Kevlar vest and helmet, and a letter from the Pentagon’s media team authorizing me to spend time visiting U.S. troops deployed to the war in Afghanistan. I had no assignment from a news organization for the trip, no contacts in the country, very little money, and I didn’t speak any of the local languages or any other language than English. No one was expecting me. 

I arrived with only the slightest notion of what I wanted to report in what was already, in its fifth year, a forgotten war for most Americans. The U.S. war in Iraq consumed most media attention and news deadlines. The Bush Administration had sold that conflict to the public with claims about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda, specious and mendacious lies that held together in the run-up to the war with the assistance of an uncritical media. Once the invasion became an occupation, those lies–like Iraq itself-unraveled. It’s hard now to convey the scale and breadth of the U.S. government’s military crusades after 9/11, how what was then known as the War on Terror had thrust American kids into places most Americans had only known of from the Bible on justifications that leaned heavily on lies and imperial fantasies.

Afghanistan was different. Or, at least, it was supposed to be. It was America’s forgotten war, America’s “good” war. I was there to bear some witness. Beyond that, I hoped to return to my girlfriend uninjured by Thanksgiving.

Before I left the U.S., my friend Bilal, an Afghan then living in Vermont, assured me that there would be dozens of taxis outside the airport terminal. But looking out across a traffic circle in front of the terminal, I saw no taxis that day in October 2006. The parking lot just beyond sat empty. Except for the few passengers on my flight who friends and relatives were picking up, there were no cars at all. Geraldo Rivera and his crew walked with their hand luggage to a waiting Toyota Land Cruiser as several Afghans pushing a cart piled with tv equipment cases followed behind. They soon departed.

I called Bilal. It was the middle of the night in Vermont, but he rarely slept more than two or three hours in a row. He picked up. He assured me the airport should be bustling with taxis and that a fare to Bagram was cheap, at most 30 dollars. It was always busy, he said. He went silent momentarily; then, I heard a loud sigh.

“It’s Eid al Fitr,” Bilal said, the end of Ramadan -- the biggest holiday of the year for Muslims. “Everyone is with their families and friends,” he told me. I had a better chance of walking to Bagram today. 

My reporting had not yet begun, but I’d already failed a basic journalistic task.

Eventually, a dented yellow Toyota Corolla entered the Airport terminal. He eyed me as soon as he rounded the traffic circle, passed by, parked his car, and returned to me on foot. We quickly established that he was a taxi driver and that I needed a ride. The price, the Afghan driver told me, would be 150 dollars. The laws of supply and demand are as immutable as gravity, even more so during a war on Ramadan. 

We were soon on our way. The war was in its fifth year, and although there were reported insurgents around Kabul generally, I wasn’t particularly concerned with a roadside check by the Taliban, Afghan thieves, or al Qaeda fighters. Instead, as my driver took us across an empty, arid expanse toward the Bagram base, I questioned my commitment to my chosen profession. I silently cursed myself for being unaware of the basic calendar. If I was going to be so useless that I needed to call Vermont to hail a taxi in Kabul, I had no business trying to cover a war.

It was mid-afternoon when the taxi stopped about 300 yards from Bagram’s main gate. The driver made it clear with gun gestures and noises that this was as far as he would go. The driver understood what I did not: any closer and a young U.S. marine in the gate booth might get nervous and fire his M-4 at us. I paid him five times what it should have cost me, chalking it up to what I like to think of as a stupidity tax, and got out of the car. I had recovered some from the professional despair on the drive and felt that though my start wasn’t promising, I still had a chance to accomplish something in Afghanistan.

As I walked toward the base gate, a few young marines kept their eyes on me from behind a window of a small guard booth. I pulled out my Pentagon media paperwork and my passport, making sure it was visible as I got closer, holding them up in what I believed was an international “Don’t Shoot!” signal. I lowered my hands as I got to the gate. I announced that I was a journalist, here for an embed, and handed my documents. 

“Which outlet are you with?” they asked. 

I was a freelancer, I told them. I didn’t then appreciate the import of that word. But in the following years, as I moved from magazines to TV networks to online journalism to writing books, I came to appreciate the legitimacy employment conferred and, ostensibly, backed by a publication. I didn’t have an assignment and wasn’t affiliated with a news organization. They appeared concerned and then confused at my response. I mentioned to one of the soldiers, a kid with a lit cigarette between his lips and not yet old enough to drink legally, that I’d written a few features for ESPN the Magazine and had once done a story about a straight male gigolo for Details magazine. He grunted and offered me a menthol. He didn’t seem to be the right person, nor this the right moment, for me to explain that I had only the faintest notion of what I was doing in Afghanistan, that I wouldn’t know what my story was until I found it, and that maybe then, and only then, might I be able to find a news outlet to publish. I only knew that four years out of journalism school, I had yet to read or watch anything about the war in Afghanistan that felt particularly true or even real.

The daily coverage was dressed up in solemn, patriotic colors: a correspondent dons their Kevlar and tapes a standup next to dirty-faced soldiers dropping mortars into a firing tube on an Afghan mountainside; a print reporter files a dispatch from an American patrol in a rural village; a wire report about a U.S. air strike which killed any number of enemy fighters, but never any civilians. The tenor of most of the coverage at the time was that the U.S. was slowly but steadily winning the war through a counterinsurgency campaign. This was a war, U.S. military officers told magazine reporters, that would be won when village markets consistently sold local tomatoes rather than produce imported from neighboring Pakistan. The press reports gave the American perspective of the war, a predictable consequence of nearly all coverage coming from embeds. Journalists were in a rush, feeding an insatiable machine for headlines and images that fit into scripted storylines for their publications and networks hoping to squeeze out “news” from what was otherwise the boring, ho-hum day-to-day reality of a small war far away from home. The journalists responsible for the war coverage weren’t dumb or unskilled. They were even hard-working. But what ended up on air and published reflected little thought or a healthy skepticism about a five-year-old war in a country no foreign army had successfully occupied. The resulting reportage somehow managed to be largely accurate but completely preposterous.

I hoped to do–a least a little bit–better. I showed up in Afghanistan for the limited perspective of an embed with U.S. forces, too, but I was there with pretensions to find something truer than what I’d consumed from inside the U.S. There were parts of this story not being told; I knew that much. Which parts? I had no idea. Surely, I wouldn’t get much of an Afghan perspective on an embed. Could I find the untold parts of what was transpiring in Afghanistan from an American perspective? I had no right to believe so but was ignorant enough to arrive at Bagram anyway. It would take me a few more years to understand that I went to Afghanistan to write what I felt hadn’t been written.

After almost an hour of radio calls and several false starts, a junior officer arrived on a bulky golf cart and drove me into the base. I started my embed.

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FROM the outset of the war, the Bush administration misunderstood almost everything about fighting in Afghanistan. From the implications of an occupying force of infidels to the country’s topography, Americans refused to accept that toppling the Taliban and destroying al Qaeda training camps was wholly different than rebuilding a nation whose porous border with Pakistan served as both a cudgel and a shield for a local insurgency. The invisible line which separated the countries ran through the Hindu Kush mountain range and seemed to split the might of American military strength from its common sense. The range, which meant “Hindu killer,” was a giant literal reminder of how the topography of the dense ranges and high-altitude peaks provided a fortress for its inhabitants against foreign invasion.

The most impenetrable fortresses were in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, where I flew by helicopter and settled in with various units from the Army’s 10^th Mountain Division. Within days it was clear to them and me that they were sent to fight a war that could not be won. There is an absurdity to standing in a U.S. firebase filled with a few hundred-armed men on the banks of a river slicing through canyons with peaks 500 feet towering above and around and only one translator. Whatever else the U.S. military thought it could accomplish in that dynamic, “winning” was not among them. The soldiers I embedded with were too young and earnest to understand what military purpose the generals and the Pentagon planners had sent them into this part of Afghanistan to achieve. They started their deployment in the country’s south, whose terrain allowed them to see their enemy from great distances and fight accordingly. Their armed vehicles could transport them for pursuit and aid in their victory. In the mountains, no such luck. 

Each day of the embed provided a new opportunity to witness the gulf between what the military asserted was the goal and what was actually transpiring in isolated mountain valleys. An example: the soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division were not, despite their namesake, trained for high-altitude combat. Many soldiers struggled to climb and traverse the steep and rocky landscape. The physical challenges left the young men taxed and often parched. The officers complained bitterly about a lack of essential support–food and water–while being dropped from helicopters on mountaintops and being ordered to patrol along ridgelines for days longer than initially planned. They urged me to publish their complaints in the hopes that higher headquarters or someone at the Pentagon would take notice and send help. They were cynical about their leadership’s aims and skeptical about their chances of success. Three months into their deployment, they felt forgotten.

American soldier sleeping at a U.S. forward operating base in Nuristan, Afghanistan 2006 Photo: Sergio Caro

One young officer, in particular, was smart enough to see the obvious while also believing in America’s good intentions. Lt. Ben Keating carried a book about Alexander the Great’s failure to conquer the people of the Hindu Kush. He led a team at a small base in a village called Kamdesh, surrounded almost entirely by steep mountain faces, the furthest reach of the U.S. military in Afghanistan’s northeast, a world away from the cosmopolitan capital. During the day, Keating and I would discuss his views of what he was doing in Afghanistan generally and Kamdesh specifically. Then, at night, between the occasional attack on the base,  I would speak at length with the CIA’s Afghan translator, getting his story and how he’d come to be working for the Americans. He possessed all the common sense from being a local and all the exasperation of witnessing his American employers make the same misjudgments and mistakes in operations up the river. I found it compelling that the two had reached the same conclusions from different perspectives. But in the few weeks they worked from the same base, they rarely, if ever, spoke to one another. 

After three weeks, I’d seen enough. I eventually walked off an American base in Jalalabad and hailed a taxi to Kabul. There, I spent a few days with the translator’s cousin, himself a translator and part-time commando for the CIA and U.S. special operations forces. He’d been working for the U.S. since he provided shelter and assistance to a small team of CIA paramilitaries who’d showed up in his Nuristan village in early 2002. He offered a larger context for what I had witnessed in the northeast. He confirmed what I saw: the U.S. had little understanding of who they were fighting in that region and could not pacify or substantively ameliorate local conditions for a population that the Americans couldn’t relate to or live among. But by the time I left Afghanistan in mid-November, I still was unsure of what I had witnessed. What was the story?

Then, shortly after I left the country, I received word that Ben Keating had died. In less than three months, insurgents had nearly decapitated the Americans’ ability to resupply Kamdesh. First, senior officers stopped helicopter landings next to the base after several near-miss attacks. Next, insurgents attacked daytime convoys on a 25-mile-long journey from the nearest base to Kamdesh. That forced Keating and his men to return empty vehicles at night on sections of roads unsuitable for most passenger cars during the day. On one such nighttime convoy, Keating drove a two-ton armored truck when the road beneath him collapsed, toppling the truck off a cliff down towards the riverbed. Keating was tossed from the cab and struck a large boulder. Keating hadn’t died in a battle, but an insurgency had killed him. He was 27 years old.

Writing about his short life and death in Afghanistan was the story. His senseless death was a way to see how futile the war he dutifully fought had become. My story was unsophisticated and simple but its skepticism aged well.  

Then, nearly three years after Keating died, more than 300 Taliban insurgents attacked the Kamdesh base. Although U.S. forces ultimately held off the attack, the battle lasted two days; eight American and two Afghan soldiers died, 22 more were injured, and the battle destroyed the base. In a cruel irony, the military was closing down Combat Outpost Keating, as it was then known when the attack occurred. Tactically, Kamdesh failed because the American military tried to defy a fundamental rule of war: always hold the higher ground. Too much of our blood and treasure had been spent in that isolated mountain valley. But not enough for the American military—and people—to forget that we were there, exposed. 

When I left Afghanistan in November 2006, it was easier to see how America’s misadventure in Kamdesh would end than to predict how much journalism would change. Although I would eventually shake off the freelance sobriquet, working for TV networks and online news organizations and becoming a published author, I couldn’t imagine that two decades later, much of what I reported then could have been done as an epic Twitter thread or a series of TikTok videos from the Hindu Kush. And so, now, I am returning to where I began, a freelancer, with all the hope and prospects for Substack that I had hailing a taxi in Kabul during Ramadan in the middle of a war.